FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT ENCOUNTERS - PAGE 4

Don Ameche, his motion picture career revitalized last year by his Oscar- winning performance in "Cocoon," has been cast for a lead role in "Harry and the Hendersons" at Universal Pictures. Ameche will costar with John Lithgow and Melinda Dillon in the comedy about a typical American family that encounters an unusual creature in a collision that changes the lives of everyone involved. William Dear directs the film.

By Dr. Ruth Westheimer, (copyright) 1996 Karola, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Distributed by King Features Syndicate | August 22, 1996

Q. Is it true -- as some of my more adventurous friends suggest -- that all heterosexual people at one time or another are somewhat bisexually curious? A. When it comes to sex, we humans do tend to be curious about all aspects of sexuality, and we express that curiosity by reading erotic literature, seeing erotic movies and fantasizing about erotic encounters, sometimes even ones with the same sex. But curiosity doesn't mean actually going out and performing the acts.

Cast members of Disney's "High School Musical" opened up about their most awkward fan encounters. "I was at an In-N-Out ... and I was actually going to the bathroom and [people] put their napkins underneath the stall!" Ashley Tisdale said during a press conference for "High School Musical 3: Senior Year," according to people.com. "That was the weirdest place someone's ever asked me for my autograph." Getty Images Photo

"Alien: The Director's Cut" (R) Who's in it Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Harry Dean Stanton What it's about A ship sent to investigate an SOS distress call encounters an alien that begins to kill the crew members one by one. Worth watching? (star)(star)(star)(star): In all, it's a most satisfying return to one of the few sci-fi films that deserves to be called a masterpiece.

I was horrified to read the following racist headline in the May 29 Tempo section: "An Eskimo encounters civilization--and mankind." The headline implies that Eskimos are themselves neither civilized nor human. Chicago Tribune editors should not need to be told that people of other cultures count as full human beings and they don't have to be of European descent to be civilized. (By the way, the term Eskimo itself is questionable, but we won't even go there.)

When Susan Clancy, a psychologist at Harvard University, wanted to study people with memories of events that had never happened, she cast her net wide. So wide it reached galaxies far, far away. Have you ever been "contacted or abducted by space aliens?" the newspaper ads she ran read. Researchers at Harvard, the ads said, were seeking subjects "to participate in a memory study." The responses tumbled in. From people outraged that a venerable institution like Harvard would raise such oddball questions.

Two teenage Fox River Grove brothers told a McHenry County jury Tuesday that they had more than 40 sexual encounters with a now-suspended Cary Junior High School teacher. The 16-year-old, now a junior at Cary-Grove High School, said he had more than 30 encounters in 1992 and 1993 with William A. Rogers, 49, a teacher for 24 years, in Rogers' Fox River Grove house. His 15-year-old brother, a student at Allendale School in Lake Villa, where he is being treated for a behavioral disorder, testified that he had more than 10 sexual encounters between early 1992 and last January in Rogers' home and in his own home.

Recently, in order to obtain Irish citizenship, I had occasion to request numerous birth, marriage and death certificates from the office of David Orr, Cook County clerk. I want to commend Mr. Orr for running an efficient, expeditious and solid operation. I called in on a voice-mail option system that I could follow, received a live call back within a half hour and received my certificates, properly authenticated, in about a week at a reasonable cost. Encounters with bureaucracies can be miserable, but this encounter was terrific.

No one could consume all of Wrigley's gum or Vienna's franks, but one guy has digested every bit of another Chicago-based product, the Encyclopaedia Britannica-and (surprise!) has written a book about it. In "The Know-It-All," Esquire editor A. J. Jacobs recounts his effort to read all 44 million words, and the profound effect his manic spewing of trivia and encounters with Mensa and "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" had on his marriage and job. And how he learned that "knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing"-and more importantly, that opossums have 13 nipples.